Register a company in Cape Verde

Yes. Incorporation, tax registrations and the CIN application can be completed under power of attorney with legalised documents. Banks often prefer to meet a manager once, so where a visit is useful, we coordinate it around banking and licensing rather than treating it as a separate trip.

Registration starts from €3,500. The registered address (from €1,800 a year) is billed separately. With an EMI or online bank account, from €5,400. CIN licence applications are priced case by case. Renewals with accounting start from $1,500 per year.

The Centro Internacional de Negócios places qualifying internationally focused trading, industrial and service businesses into a special regime: 5% corporate tax at the initial employment level, falling to 3.5% and 2.5% as local hiring increases, together with customs relief on qualifying inputs. The conditions are real - jobs, substance and international orientation - and they are monitored. For qualifying operators, it is one of the cleanest single-digit regimes on any clean list, and we model the employment ladder before any commitment is made.

Standard corporate tax is 21%, VAT is 15%, dividends are taxed at 10%, and employer social contributions are around 15%. Tourism projects of public importance may receive separate incentive packages. The difference between 21% and 2.5% makes the regime decision one of the first questions when structuring the company, not something to consider after incorporation.

The escudo has been fixed to the euro for decades under a formal cooperation agreement with Portugal, giving the peg a European institutional anchor rather than relying only on domestic monetary policy. Planning, pricing and repatriation therefore take place in a relatively stable currency environment, which is unusual in this part of the region.

Cape Verde is developing a framework for virtual assets, and questions around licensed digital-asset activity arise regularly. Our position: the framework is still young, each project needs to be assessed individually, and anyone selling a turnkey 'Cape Verde crypto licence' today is ahead of the paperwork. Where a business model fits the current rules, we structure it properly; where it does not, we say so and point elsewhere.

No. The jurisdiction sits on clean lists, combines strong African governance rankings with a special relationship with the EU, and operates through a transparent registry. This matters because banks and counterparties can assess a Cape Verdean company without the additional perception risk associated with some traditional island jurisdictions.

The main constraints are scale and logistics: around half a million people spread across ten islands, heavy reliance on imports, higher inter-island transport costs and a skilled but relatively small labour pool. Senior hires may need to come from the diaspora, while tourism seasons affect the broader economic cycle. These factors are manageable for service and trading structures but become more important for physical operations.

They serve different purposes. Tenerife’s ZEC offers 4% inside the EU but comes with European substance costs; the Seychelles provides a traditional registry structure with territorial taxation and a different international perception; Cape Verde offers 2.5-5% under CIN, a euro-fixed currency and lusophone commercial links. EU-focused operators may prefer ZEC, pure registry structures may lean toward the Seychelles, while internationally focused businesses seeking hard-currency stability without full EU overhead can consider Cape Verde.

The company takes one to three weeks through the one-stop process. Banking usually adds another one to two weeks, while the CIN licence takes around three to eight weeks with a proper employment plan. A working, banked structure operating under a single-digit regime within two months remains a realistic benchmark.